Kept Strange · Photography

The crew came first. The brand was an excuse to keep shooting.

Kept Strange was a group of us who rode BMX and skated around Cheltenham. I was the one with the camera, so I ended up shooting everyone, and then I started drawing a logo for a thing that didn't really exist. There was no client, no brief and nobody asking for it.

What I didn't realise at the time is that I was building a brand pack. A wordmark, a mark, a set of rules for how they sat on a photograph, and a portrait treatment that held the whole crew together. It's the same object I now build for a brewery or a supper club, made ten years earlier with worse tools and more time.

The wordmarkBrushed by hand and scanned in. I redrew it constantly and this is the one that stuck.

A white line-drawn lion's head on black, locked up above and below with the words Kept Strange — The markA lion, because we were sixteen. The lockup is more disciplined than the reason for it.

The word Kept repeated five times down a dark frame, each in a different colour with the channels offset — ColourwaysTesting the mark in five colours with the channels pulled apart. The instinct to try every version at once has not gone anywhere.

The crew, as a pattern. Everyone's face reduced to pure black and white and used as the texture of the brand. It's a cheap technique and it still works, because the faces are real and nobody is posing.

Three black and white frames side by side: a rider silhouetted mid-drop, a figure with an arm raised, and a rider landing, with the word KEPT set across the middle panel — Three frames, one momentCutting a single trick into three panels, which is editing before I knew that was what it was called.

A rider in yellow suspended mid-air on a BMX against a flat teal sky, no ground visible — The one I still likeNo ground, no context, a flat field of colour and a person hanging in it. I have made this photograph again since, with other subjects.

A skater caught mid-kickflip in the middle of an empty industrial street, board turning under him, shot from ground level — Mid-flipLying in the road with a wide lens, which is the only way to make a street look this big.

A skater standing against a pale blue wall covered in pasted bird stencils and blue spray tags, board held behind him — Against the blue wallFound the wall first and waited for someone to stand in front of it.

A BMX rider in a red hoodie airborne above a skatepark ramp, everything else in black and white, with the rest of the crew watching from the deck — One red hoodieSelective colour, which is a trick, and it still works because everyone else is watching him.

A dusk sky graded purple, with a hand-drawn crown and the word changes repeated in overlapping tags, a crescent moon and a dark treeline below — **Changes.** A crown and a tag laid over a photograph of the sky at dusk. Sixteen-year-old graphic design, and I would still put it on a record sleeve.

The footage that survives. Three clips off the same camera, joined end to end. Twenty-seven seconds is all that is left of the video, and I have not cut or graded it, because whatever edit existed is gone.

A face coming out of the dark.

This was the Year 12 project, called Personal Opinions, and it is the best photography on this page. One subject, a black ground, and a single light placed so that most of the face stays gone. I shot it over and over until the fall-off landed exactly where I wanted it.

The whole point is what you cannot see. There is no set, no context and nothing to read except the parts of a face the light happens to reach, which puts the entire weight of the picture on the person holding still and trusting you.

A black and white low-key portrait of a young man, the light catching one side of his face and the rest falling into black — The oneBlack and white, because the colour version was busier and said less.

A colour low-key portrait, the face emerging from complete darkness with the eyes catching the light — Straight onNothing lit but the front of the face. The background is not dark, it is absent.

A low-key portrait of a young man in a flat cap, the brim throwing his eyes into shadow — Under a capThe brim takes the eyes, and the picture gets better for losing them.

Four low-key portraits arranged as a two by two grid on black, the same subject lit four different ways — **The final piece, as it was submitted.** Four frames as one object, so the series is read as a set of decisions rather than four separate pictures.

A mock-up of a bare concrete gallery space with the portrait grid hung small and centred on the far wall — **Mocked up on a wall before it existed.** Hung small in a big empty room, to check the work could hold a space rather than only a page. I still do this, in a browser now instead of a gallery.

We used to get into buildings nobody was using.

The other half of that year happened in empty places: a shut-down nursery with the polythene coming off the frames, a stripped office with the paperwork still on the desk, a corridor lit red by whatever was left plugged in. We were teenagers climbing through gaps in fences, and I brought a camera.

It taught me something the portraits could not. In a studio you add light until the picture works. In a derelict greenhouse in February you get exactly what is there, and the only decisions left are where to stand and when to press.

A green painted door frame with a smashed window, an Employees Only sign, and a figure in a hood visible through the broken glass in a red-lit room beyond — Employees onlyThe sign is the joke. Green frame, red room, and somebody who should not be in there.

A narrow corridor lined with red racking, lit entirely red, with a figure standing at the far end silhouetted against a bright doorway — The red corridorOne colour, one figure, and a door at the end doing all the work.

Inside a derelict greenhouse, torn polythene hanging from the roof frame, a lone figure standing among the debris — Under the polytheneFlat February light through torn plastic, which is the softest box you will ever get for free.

Two figures standing on raised beds inside a long abandoned greenhouse, the roof structure receding to a bright far wall — **The nursery.** Symmetry, one-point perspective, two people small in it. The most conventional photograph here and the one that holds up best at size.

A night portrait: a young man standing under a cherry tree in blossom, the lights of a town spread out behind him — **And then the nights.** Blossom lit from below, a town out of focus behind, and a long enough exposure that he had to stand very still.

A heavily degraded black and white image of a bearded face with a crown of thorns, printed or projected onto a rough dark surface and photographed — **Found, not made.** Something already on a wall in one of those buildings, shot straight and left alone. Half of what is in this section is just noticing.

Hard light, one face, and a blind.

The A-level work went somewhere quieter. I got interested in what a window blind does to a face at four in the afternoon, and shot the same friend over and over until the light did the thing I wanted.

The useful part was learning to wait for a condition rather than arrange one. I had no lighting kit and no studio, so the only variables were the time of day, the room, and how long the person would put up with me.

A black and white portrait of a young man, hard diagonal blind shadows falling across his face and chest — Blind, black and whiteThe shadow does the composition. Nothing in the frame but him and the light.

A colour portrait of the same subject in a blue polo shirt, striped shadow across the face, eyes to camera — The same set-up in colourWarmer, and worse. Useful to keep, because it is the reason I stopped shooting these in colour.

A tight crop of a face behind a hand, shadows and motion blur breaking the features apart — Pushed furtherCropping in until the face stops being a portrait and starts being a shape.

A mocked-up Dazed magazine cover using the black and white portrait, with a masthead, barcode and the word Portraiture running up the right edge — **Mocked up as Dazed.** Putting the picture into a cover so I could see whether it held at that size and next to a masthead. This is art direction, done at seventeen without the word for it.

The thing this taught me

A photograph on its own is hard to judge. A photograph inside the format it has to survive, a cover, a spread, a feed, tells you immediately whether it works. I still do this. The DEYA packshots get reviewed at full size against a fixed gate, for the same reason these got dropped into a magazine cover.

Then I built a magazine, so the pictures had somewhere to live.

Twenty-two pages, called Portraiture. I shot it, designed it, wrote the copy and laid out every spread. The same friend is in most of it, because he was the one who kept saying yes.

The spread I would defend is the covers one. I took a single frame, put it on the front of Dazed again and again, and changed one thing each time to see which version still held at cover size. That is a review gate. I just did not have the words for it yet.

The cover of a magazine called Portraiture: a black and white portrait of a young man looking straight at the camera, masthead across the top — **The cover.** Set, printed and bound as a real object rather than a folder of files.

A full-bleed spread of a portrait lit orange, the subject pulling a bucket hat down over his eyes — Gel, orangeColour doing the whole job, with the face given up to it.

Gel, redThe same set-up pushed until it stops being flattering.

A spread titled Girl in large pink type, with a black and white portrait and a red-lit portrait side by side — Type as a blockOne word, set enormous, holding two pictures together.

The other book is just everyone I knew.

Nineteen pages, shot over about a year. Cars at night, the reservoir at sunset, someone's bedroom, the woods behind the school. It opens on a contact sheet of every frame, which I still think is the right way to start anything.

Every spread carries a note about why the picture is in there and what I would change. I was seventeen and marking my own work in the margin. That habit never went anywhere. It is the same reflex that puts an honest section at the bottom of everything else on this site.

An opening page made entirely of a dense contact sheet: dozens of small photographs of friends, cars, woods and sunsets tiled edge to edge — **The opening page.** Every frame from the project, shown before any of it is explained.

A spread of three vertical frames: woodland, a figure walking at the water's edge, and a pink sunset over a reservoir — **The reservoir.** Three frames from one evening, sequenced rather than picked.

Two figures silhouetted against a firework going off at ground level in a dark park, street lights and railings behind them — **Bonfire night, in a park.** Nobody is looking at the camera and nobody knew it was being taken, which is the whole of this project in one frame.

A spread with a dark Polaroid-style portrait on the left and a night portrait on the right, both surrounded by hand-drawn red graffiti tags — **Drawn straight onto the page.** The tags are hand-drawn over the layout, which is the one moment the book stops behaving itself.

Underneath the layouts, the photographs are just evenings. This is what most of the year actually looked like.

Two young men sitting on a skatepark ramp at sunset, backlit, with a BMX laid down beside them and a third rider in the background — The skatepark, last lightShooting into the sun and letting the flare take half the frame.

A portrait taken in a car at night, interior light on the subject's face, a second figure blurred by motion beside him — In the carA slow shutter, one dome light, and whoever moved got smeared.

I made my first joiner at seventeen and forgot about it.

This one stopped me when I found it. A friend on a beach, built out of overlapping rectangular fragments with the edges left showing, so you can see the picture is assembled rather than taken.

In 2026 I spent weeks on a photographic joiner of a balcony view in Penang, and wrote it up as a technique I had taken from Hockney. I had already made one, in about 2016, from a holiday photograph. Some of the travel work on this page is Penang as well, which I also hadn't joined up until now.

A portrait of a laughing young man in a cap, assembled from overlapping rectangular photographic fragments with visible edges, on a sandy background — The joiner, c.2016Overlapping fragments, edges left visible. Low resolution, because it survived only as an upload.

A street in George Town, Penang: low shophouses, parked cars, a group of men talking in the road — Penang, streetShot on the same trip. Ten years later I built a joiner of a balcony view in the same city.

Rows of red and yellow paper lanterns strung above a temple roof against a pale sky — Penang, lanternsRepetition, one colour, a single subject filling the frame. A habit that turns up everywhere later.

What it was actually for.

None of this was a portfolio. It was a way of spending time with my friends and having a reason to be there. The photographs are good in places and ordinary in others, and the ordinary ones are still the ones I would keep, because they are the only record of who those people were at that age.

The work reads differently to me now. I was naming things, drawing marks, testing colourways, cutting frames together and putting pictures inside formats to see if they held. Nobody taught me any of that and no one asked for it.

An honest note on the files

Several of these survive only as social uploads, so they are small and have been compressed more than once. The originals are on a memory stick and some of them are gone. I have not upscaled or cleaned anything for this page: what is here is what is left.